


Emerald Light Refracted And Dispersed

by rthstewart



Category: Star Wars Legends: Hand of Thrawn Duology - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:05:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rthstewart/pseuds/rthstewart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It reminds me of a piece of jade. The emerald light coming from within is refracted and dispersed according to the consistency of the impurities that gave it its quality.”<br/>Thomas D'Evelyn</p><p>Mara Jade and Talon Karrde don't talk about feelings, except when they do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emerald Light Refracted And Dispersed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ancarett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancarett/gifts).



 A treat for ancarett

This may be read in conjunction with another treat, _Home Game_ , also posted.  The two stories together fill in some gaps about Mara, her association with Talon Karrde, Luke's gift of Anakin's lightsaber at the end of _The Last Command_ , and the importance of her ship, the _Jade's Fire_.  This story is set in three parts, right after the conclusion of _The Last Command_ , after the events of Stackpole's _I, Jedi_ and KJA's Jedi Academy trilogy, and finally at the conclusion of _Vision of the Future_.  For the most coherence, you might want to try reading the first two parts, hop over to _Home Game_ and read that, then come back to the final segment here.

* * *

 

Karrde’s pings on her comm had been increasing in tempo and frequency the last hour.  _Of course_ she knew the _Wild Karrde’s_ lift window grudgingly granted by Coruscant Space Control was closing.  _Of course_ she would be on time.  Honestly, given that they, too, were heroes of the Mount Tantiss expeditionary force, Karrde really should have gotten better landing privileges. 

One more thing to add to the ever growing _To Do_ list as Karrde’s new liaison to this new Smugglers' Alliance.  Mara was skeptical – a smugglers’ alliance was an oxymoron as surely as military intelligence or jumbo shrimp.

She’d said good-bye to Skywalker, left the Jedi on the roof contemplating inner peace or navel fuzz (with Skywalker, you could never be sure), packed her bag, and pinged Karrde back – twice – with _yes, I’m coming, and please don’t send the vornskrs out_. 

Throwing her flight bag over her shoulder and jogging to the _Wild Karrde_ ’s platform, it felt really strange, in a really good way, to feel again the familiar weight of a lightsaber thumping against her leg. 

Karrde was standing at the top of the ship’s ramp, arms crossed, trying to not look concerned.  Mara wouldn’t tell him that reading emotional states had gotten a lot easier again after spending so much time with a Jedi who was all in the _Feel the Force._

“Were you worried I wasn’t going to make it?” she called.

“I was worried you might not come at all.”

“Why would you think that?”

Mara ducked under the bulkhead, shouldered around her broody boss, and came aboard. 

Karrde pointed to the lightsaber handle hanging from her belt. 

 _Well, that didn’t take long._  

“You’re the one carrying a Jedi’s weapon,” Karrde chided.  “Leading me to wonder, did you finally kill Skywalker and steal it?”

He looked over her shoulder, toward the Palace’s turbo lift doors.

Mara now really wished she’d been better able to hide her hatred of Skywalker from Karrde.  “I’m _not_ bringing NR forces down on top of us.  When I left him, Skywalker was trying to be one with the Force on the roof of the Palace that I did not push him off of.  Killing his clone has taken care of the impulse.” 

 _For now._   Mara wasn’t going to make any promises.  

“Everyone else aboard?” Mara asked.

“Yes.  You were the one we were waiting for.”

Mara reached over and slapped the controls and with a hiss of hydraulics, the ramp retracted and the hatch door slid shut.  The hum of Coruscant winked out as the _Wild Karrde_ sealed them in.

Karrde frowned and stared again the lightsaber.  Mara hefted it up so he could look at it.  She felt again that thrill of warm hand on cool metal.  It was heavy – Vader had been tall and strong even before he’d become Vader.  The handle was too big for her grip, and awkward, but there was no way she was ever going to give up Darth Vader’s own lightsaber!

“When I said I was interested in you becoming a liaison with the NR, Jedi wasn’t what I had in mind, Mara.  I’m not sure such a paragon of justice of the Old Republic is going to be comfortable on my crew.”

She had to laugh at that and shook her head.  “I’m no Jedi, Karrde.”

“What about the lightsaber then?”

“Skywalker gave it to me.”

Well that was the wrong thing to say judging from Karrde’s startled reaction.  “He _gave_ you _his_ lightsaber?” 

“Well, not his, no.”  She hefted it again in her hands, relishing the feel of it.  She had missed this _so_ much.  As much as she had loved her old one, having Darth Vader’s own lightsaber was maybe even better. 

“So he just gave you someone else's lightsaber?  Just like that?”

“Yeah.” 

Karrde thumbed his comm.  “Aves, we’re all accounted for.  Take us up before someone changes his mind.  If anyone hails us, give them a burst of something unintelligible.  We’ll come up to the bridge for the jump.  The coordinates are already in the nav.”

He gestured, arm going wide.  “Shall we?”

Mara dropped her bag in a cargo net to collect later and fell in step with Karrde as they went forward, toward the bridge.  The lightsaber was staying with her.  Karrde knew what it was; maybe the rest of the crew would think it was a really big lipstick. 

“Karrde, have we still got room in the aft hold?"

“We've not taken anything on yet.  Why do you ask?”

The passage narrowed and they started climbing the stair up to the bridge as the _Wild Karrde_ ’s engines thrummed to life around them. 

“After the jump, I’m going down to the hold.”  She patted the handle hanging from her belt.  “We’ll be getting acquainted.”

“You’re going to turn that thing on?  On my ship?”

She couldn’t stop the smile pulling at her lips.  “Don’t worry, Karrde.  I know what I’m doing.”

 “I don’t doubt that, but please don't cut into anything vital by mistake."  He shied away from her and the dangling lightsaber, not wanting to get too close.  "Mara, are you _sure_ no one will come looking to get it back?” 

 _I have Darth Vader’s old lightsaber._  

“That won’t happen,” Mara assured him, smiling again.  “The Jedi it belonged to is dead …”

 _And if the blue ghost of Darth Vader shows up on the bridge of the Wild Karrde and asks for his lightsaber, I’ll kill him._  

“Besides, he wasn’t worthy of it,” Mara concluded with finality. 

“And you are?”

 _I have Darth Vader’s old lightsaber._  

“Yeah, I am.”

 ooOOoo

This time, the galactic crisis was yet _another_ piece of starkilling tech that seemed to litter the galaxy, left over from the Empire, that was just waiting for, as Mara would say, an Imperial agent, megalomaniac, or Dark Side Force user to find it.  Why didn’t Imperial admirals _stay_ dead and lost?

Karrde fell asleep in his office over the garbled and hysterical intelligence reports of a rogue Jedi named Kyp Durron, a destroyed star system, millions of dead sentients, and Mara’s furious encrypt that Durron had stolen her Z-95.  He woke briefly when shuttle control rang him up in the dark hours before dawn to say that Mara had returned, was going to bed, intended to sleep for the next two standard days, and would brief him when she woke up. 

When she did finally appear in his office, he didn't like the dark circles under her eyes, the freshly healed injuries and, worse still, the look of defeat.  Mara slumped into a chair across from him; her lightsaber banged against the table.  With a grimace and muttering about lipstick, Mara unclipped it from her belt and set it on the table with a sigh.

"Anything further to add to the report?"

She shook her head.  "It's all there, about Durron, Daala, and the rest of it.”

“And what’s not in the report?”

She sighed again.  "Skywalker's made a mess of his Jedi school."

“Obviously, if he’s got students stealing super weapons and destroying stars.”

Mara slammed her fist down on the table so hard, she nearly knocked his data reader and her lightsaber off the table.  Both stopped rocking abruptly -- one of those handy Force skills Mara had evidently mastered, so perhaps her time on Yavin IV hadn't been a complete waste of time.

“It’s the damned school, Karrde, and Skywalker.  Durron is to blame, for sure, but the whole system Skywalker’s set up is certain to produce failure!” 

She winced, as if with a headache, and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers.  Closing her eyes, she muttered, “I’m only surprised that it’s not worse than it is.”

For the rest of the galaxy, he was sorry.  For himself, Karrde was pleased.  "And yet every time you go there, Mara, I keep thinking that you will leave here for good and finally become a Jedi."

"I'm no Jedi, Karrde, at least, not the way Skywalker teaches it,” she concluded with a derisive snort.  Mara rubbed her forehead and then let her hands fall to the table.  She rolled the lightsaber handle back and forth; it made a heavy _thunk_ sound as it rolled across the table.   

“I hate that damned jungle.  Yavin IV sure isn’t a good place _for me_ to find inner peace.”

That was as blunt as Mara ever got in speaking with him of her time with Palpatine. 

“And who decides it’s a good idea to train a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears fumbling Force-sensitives in a place infested with a Dark Side presence?”  Mara jumped up from her seat and began pacing the length of his bare office, her irritation understandably finally getting the better of her during what had been a truly rotten period. 

Mara's voice hiked with anger.  “I remember what Jedi were.  I saw it myself.  Leading those monastic, isolated existences is part of what brought them down.  Skywalker's not learned _anything_ from their mistakes.  He’s repeating them, compounding them, even.  And the _arrogance_ …"

She let out an exasperated groan, undoubtedly something she'd been withholding for weeks, and let her flailing arms fall to her sides.  He always wondered what Mara did, how she did it, but he could see the deep, cleansing breath, the way the tension leached from her body, and the calm that returned. 

“Sorry,” Mara said and again took her seat.  “I shouldn’t have said all that.” 

“As you say, it’s what’s not in the report.  I appreciate your confidence and you have my discretion, Mara.  I can’t begin to understand the situation as you do.  I admit to considerable pique on your behalf.”

Her head came up.  “What do you mean?”

It was truly the most confounding thing and the longer he thought on it, the less he understood it. 

 “Only that with all these unstable Force users on Yavin IV, and these disastrous failures, why doesn’t Skywalker just concentrate on training you?” 

Skywalker had given Mara a lightsaber, the one Karrde had learned had been cut from his own hand on Bespin.  Surely that meant something significant in the language of the Jedi?

“You’d think that would be the smart thing to do, wouldn’t you?”  Mara replied, now sounding more brittle than bitter.  “I _could_ help, I’m willing to learn, and I could teach.  But Skywalker’s made it clear he’s not interested in me."

She picked up the lightsaber and weighed it in her hands.  Karrde had seldom seen her actually use it but Mara’s own growth and blossoming skills had been obvious to him. "I’m through.  Let them rot in the jungle and Skywalker can wallow in his isolation.  I’ll just be there to sweep up the carnage when it all goes to hell, _again_.”

“Selfishly, I’m glad you’ve not stayed with Skywalker, but I don’t want you to close the door on opportunities, Mara.”  The Smugglers’ Alliance was her present but it might not be her future.    

Mara’s eyes narrowed in that way that signaled he’d gone too far.  “Don’t go making decisions for me, Karrde.  This is where I belong.”  She clipped the lightsaber back on her belt.  “But if you’ve got something that takes me a long way away from Skywalker and Jedi, I’d be glad for the change of scenery and company whose idea of a good time doesn’t involve swinging from vines in the jungle.”

Karrde glanced at his data reader and scrolled through the file on Jorj Car’das, personally encrypted to his own fingerprint and retinal scan.  Mara had confided in him; he could do no less now.

“Actually, Mara, there is something you can do.  It is a long-term project and one that you can recruit the personnel for, though I do have one suggestion I'll ask you to consider."

Everything about her brightened and she craned her neck for a closer look at his data reader.  "Oh?  Does it have anything to do with that encrypted file in front of you I've been trying read?"

He keyed in the decrypt on the file of his own ugly personal history and turned the reader around so she could see it.  "What do you know about how I came to start this organization?”

ooOOoo

Mara found him on Coruscant a few days after Nirauan   Karrde didn’t think he’d been avoiding her, or she him.  It had simply been very busy.  The aftermath of the Caamas situation and his own reunion with Car’das had been complicated, personally and politically.  As for Mara, Karrde supposed that since she was marrying Skywalker, they both should probably start calling him _Luke_. 

When he complained to Shada that Mara’s report on her and _Luke's_ infiltration of the Chiss compound was obviously incomplete, Shada was very tart in response.  “Do you really want to be reading how Mara and Luke _finally_ admitted they were in love with each other while crawling through the Nirauan cave system?  _Really?_ Because there're limits to what an information broker should know and that’s one of them.”

It was a fair point.

Shada added to her argument that morning when he again awoke with her beside him in the bunk -- a sensation he was enjoying but that was taking some getting used to.  “Besides, Talon, it’s not as if you need any pointers from Mara on love.  You’re doing just fine." 

Also a fair point.

Mara timed her visit to the room  he shared with Shada late enough in the Palace day that Shada was off seeing to her own affairs.

The lightsaber was at Mara’s side, worn with a real confidence and pride.  Mara Jade was finally a Jedi.  The two of them actually embraced, though it was an awkward patting on the back.

“A hug?  Shada’s turned you soft and sentimental!”

“Don’t tease, Mara, unless you’re prepared for me to deliver the same.”  He wasn’t going to ask how Mara had found out about Shada.  He really didn’t want to know.

They sat in the conversation cluster of the compact room's living quarters, staring at one another.  It was impossible to know where to begin.  He knew one thing to say and best get it out of the way before they moved to happier matters.

“I’m very sorry about the _Jade’s Fire_ , Mara.  It was really a truly noble sacrifice on your part and I know what it cost you.”

She physically winced, the pain of the loss of her beloved ship on Nirauan still fresh and raw in her countenance.  He leaned forward and took her hands in his own.  “I am so sorry.” 

Mara squeezed his hands.  “Thanks, Karrde.  It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  Still, I lost the _Fire_ , but I gained Luke.”

“And that’s a fair trade?”

 “It is.”  Mara pulled away and leaned back in her chair, looking unconscionably smug.  “And you and Shada?  Tell me more!”

It was so uncomfortable saying anything of something so unexpected and so inexplicably wonderful.    

“I have known her almost as long as you’ve known Skywalker – Luke.  She’s made some sacrifices.  She is a remarkable person.  She doesn’t seem to mind my old face and gray hair.” 

 Mara smiled.  “I suppose it’s taken us both ten years to find happiness.”

“We’ve been happy!” Karrde protested.

“We have!” Mara replied.  “But having romantic happiness doesn’t diminish what you’ve built and given to all of us in your organization.  It’s just a different kind of happiness.   A being can love more than one thing, in more than one way.”

“Yes, I suppose,” he conceded.  The depth and fervor of Mara’s words eased the nagging guilt he felt for not doing more for his people, despite Car’das’ assurances.  He had tried to give them all a family and a place to call home.

“Karrde, we both just ended up with something we didn’t expect, with someone we didn’t expect.”

“Certainly it caught me by surprise, which really doesn’t happen very often anymore.”

The whole point of being an information broker was to avoid surprises.  Karrde didn’t like surprises.  Unless he could profit from them, which he supposed he was this time, too, just in a way that wasn't measured in credits and intelligence.

“Which brings me to a favor,” Mara said. 

He quelled the old urge to ask about the cost of the favor and, for the moment, just listen to her offer.

“Luke and I have already made our vows, and that’s all that really matters.  But having a Jedi ceremony is important to Luke, and I think we do need something public to show what a Jedi bond can be.  The ceremony we’re using involves us each being accompanied by a family member – it's sort of symbolic, leaving one family for your new one.”

“Well, that’s fine for Skywalker,” Karrde replied.  All this time and he could still feel a little defensive on Mara’s behalf.  She had no family, no parents, no ties to anyone. 

“It is less clear for me,” Mara admitted.  “But as you so often say, a family isn’t just the one you were born into, so I think the solution is obvious.”

She arched an eyebrow, inviting him to provide the obvious solution.

Karrde leaned forward again and took her hands.  “Mara Jade, you’ve been a valued, trusted, and loved member of my family for a long time.  To a being, each of us would gladly serve as escort.  I’d be honored to stand in for them all if your husband and in-laws don’t mind the lack of respectability.” 

ooOOoo

 


End file.
